APA Style

Mon, 05/18/2009 - 19:54 — Tim

The APA style is a rather tricky beast as it requires two formats for references - ie (Smith & Jones, 1987, p. 27) or Smith and Jones (1987, p.27). Is it possible for biblioscape to support both or are we resigned to having only the first and having to manually typing the second? I know I only have to type the Smith and Jones and not the info inside the parenteses but it is very irritating to have to do. Rewriting to accommodate the style is tedious and tends to change the emphasis level of the writing.

For example it is much better to use "Smith and Jones (1987) argue that" rather than "It is argued that ... (Smith & Jones, 1987).

No bibliographic software allows this directly although Notabene comes close with its alternate citations ability- however, each reference has to have this as a db entry which is then entered as a field.

This featuer is supported by all major bibliographic software. In Biblioscape, you need to add "^na" inside the temporary citation. So Biblioscape will not include authors in the formatted citation when the author name is already included in the main text. There are some examples at: http://biblioscape.com/manual_v8/temporary_citations_examples.htm

Sorry but not the way I would like it to work - I don't want to write "Smith and Jones" 50 times in a paper I want to do it once as an alternate form of the standard (Smith & Jones 1987) in the reference list and then have the option of using the standard citation or the alternate form in the same paper. Also note that the "and" and "&" are explicit in the style.

As far as I know only Notabene allows alternate citations but you have to construct them as entire fields in the database.

As for making sure that the authors' names in the correct style as well, you could put in a double reference, the first one with ^np^ny to suppress parentheses and year, and the second with ^na to suppress the authors. Since the stuff left of the # isn't used in finding and formatting the references, you can delete some of the repeated stuff, and end up with:

[Smith 1987^np^ny#1234] [^na#1234]

This is how I do references of this kind.

Yehuda N. Falk
Associate Professor of Linguistics
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Paul
Notabene isn't perfect either but you can have more than one style in the same document by puting a citation style in an empty database fiels and using insert whole field as citation. I would post some screen shots but the forum doesn't allow it.

I actually use Biblioscape, endnote and notabene together - biblioscape as a research manager, notabene for writing and endnote because I have to submit papers using it and msword. Not ideal but I find that each program has something the others can't do or don't do as well. What I really want is a linux solution that is native 64 bit that integrates with latex etc etc.

Anyway the solutions offered by forum members also work. The APA is a difficult style to get right and will be made worse leter this year when version 6 of the manual is released.

What is the difference of writing it once and copying it, surnames and the temp citation with ^na together? You would still have to insert your alternative citation - seems like the same amount of work to me...